Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Friday January 27.

The Politics of Cowardice (“We have a word for people who are dominated by fear. We call them cowards. Trump was not a coward in the business or campaign worlds…as president his is a policy of cowardice. On every front, he wants to shrink the country into a shell.”)

The Closing of Trump’s America (“Great. Terrific. Phenomenal. Tremendous. Fabulous. Beautiful. How Trump has hollowed out these words. How arid, even nauseating, he has made them. They mean nothing. They are space-fillers issuing with a thudding regularity from his uncurious mind, and in the end of course they are all about him. Emptying words of meaning is an essential step on the road to autocratic rule. People need to lose their bearings before they prostrate themselves…This is worse than had seemed possible: Trump’s inexhaustible obsession with the crowd size at the inauguration; his constant untruths; his perverse inability to accept that he won the election, to the point that he wants to investigate the popular vote that he lost; his startling lust for torture, walls, banishment and carnage.”)

Trump’s Hollowed-Out State Department (“Abrupt departures of top officials Wednesday, under disputed circumstances, leave Foggy Bottom without a confirmed secretary or nominees for several top leadership jobs.”)

Yet another Trump official with curiously familiar words(“On Nov. 19, 2015, McGahn, then a partner with the firm Jones Day representing the Trump campaign, filed a brief with the Federal Election Commission that looked like a cut-and-paste of a brief filed by another respondent 15 days earlier. A chunk of more than 300 words, essentially the entire analysis, is a word-for-word reproduction of the other brief.”)

Re the McGahn brief story, I don’t see a problem with lifting some legal analysis from a legal opinion or from some other brief, and using it. That happens all the time. Clients don’t want to pay lawyers to constantly reinvent the wheel. I could repeat that sentence ten times and that would be insufficient to emphasis the point. Most likely, McGahn didn’t actually write that brief anyway, it was probably done by an associate or law clerk. Of course, if he filed it he is responsible for it, but it isn’t some college paper where it is going to be run through some program that searches for plagiarism.

In fact, electronic legal research services like Westlaw Next for instance are increasingly offering up court filings in response to searches, in effect turning the entire dockets of courts into brief banks. A lawyer would be a fool not to use that. (And clients don’t want to pay from the electronic legal research service either – that is overhead.)

Now, if McGahn took that brief and offered it as part of his own personal writing sample in order to apply for a government position, that would be different. Is that what we are talking about here?

Not sure, but Dana Milbank writes: “One lawyer who has argued enforcement cases before the FEC for more than two decades said he had never seen an argument copied word-for-word like this. The lawyer, who was not authorized by his firm to be named, said submitting a nearly identical brief is ‘at the very least bad form.'”

Quizzical

It seems like both briefs were about whether there was a violation of election laws when the Trump campaign’s publicity vendor hired another vendor who brought in paid actors to cheer Trump on during the event when he announced his candidacy for President. It was nauseating to me when I realized that that happened and Trump got away with it. He’s gotten away with so many things that would have been fatal to most other candidates. I still really don’t understand why.

As for the briefs, it probably is bad form before the FEC to submit a nearly identical brief, but if it is $12,000 matter and the facts are identical to another matter that was already briefed, I can see why they decided to save their client some money. They probably should have gotten out a thesaurus and changed happy to glad and glad to happy throughout, which would have saved Jones Day some embarrassment. But maybe they never figured that Trump would win.

President Donald Trump’s administration has
abruptly halted ads and outreach for Obamacare set to run during the
final days of the 2017 open enrollment season, according to a report
published Thursday by Politico.

Even ads that President Barack Obama’s administration already placed and paid for have been pulled, Politico reported,
citing sources at the Department of Health and Human Services and on
Capitol Hill. The White House has also reportedly halted media outreach
promoting enrollment, including emails sent to visitors to
HealthCare.gov.

Yep, the Trumpsters are now ACTIVELY trying to sabotage and kill the Affordable Care Act. Can you imagine if Barack Obama had tried something like this? The right-wing would have been screaming “DICTATOR!” from every corner of their fetid, fever-swamp echo chamber.

True Blue

Words matter! Joy Reid and David Frum had an excellent conversation with Lawrence O’Donnell last night:

Great response by a Facebook friend of mine to Trump’s ignorant comment that Mexico has (supposedly) taken advantage of the US.

“No, you idiot.America has taken advantage of them. America has taken advantage of their workers. America has taken advantage of their military and law enforcement fighting America’s war on drugs, killing far more Mexicans than Americans. America has polluted their environment. America has even gone to war to take their land. America has taken advantage of their immigrants, having them do jobs that no American would do for pay that no American would work for, so that we can undercut Mexico’s agricultural prices on the international market.”

Elaine Owens

I have a legal question. If NAFTA, negotiated during the George H.W. Bush administration, submitted to Congress, passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, became a treaty in force according to our constitutional process, how can the Trump administration unilaterally decide to impose a 20% border tax on goods from Mexico? I realize Paul Ryan is taken with that as a way to raise revenue , but how would such a preposterous thing get through both houses of Congress? After all, it would basically be a tax on the American people when the goods were put up for sale here at a higher price. I know that Trump and his cronies hardly care if foodstuffs and other goods increase in price, but working class Americans certainly would. (And, I’m not ever considering the probably trade war such a stupid tax would start with other countries.)

Sen. Mark Warner re: the Trump Administration executive order on the U.S. refugee program:

“The Trump Administration executive order that indefinitely suspends the Syrian refugee program and pauses visas from Muslim countries runs counter to our American values. While I have always been open to a pause on our refugee program to ensure appropriate time for intelligence and law enforcement experts to ensure we protect our national security, these actions by the President presume the solution before the review is complete. It is a policy targeting Muslims that national security experts have testified would harm, not help, our national security interests. I join the interfaith community in Virginia and around the country in objecting to these moves, and I will work in Congress to block an effort which trades dubious increases in U.S. security for certain alienation of partners with whom we must cooperate to address terrorism.”